Sunday, March 15. 2015

Just wanted to quickly announce two talks I'll give in the upcoming weeks: One at BSidesHN (Hannover, 20th March) about some findings related to PGP and keyservers and one at the Easterhegg (Braunschweig, 4th April) about the current state of TLS.

A look at the PGP ecosystem and its keys

PGP-based e-mail encryption is widely regarded as an important tool to provide confidential and secure communication. The PGP ecosystem consists of the OpenPGP standard, different implementations (mostly GnuPG and the original PGP) and keyservers.

The PGP keyservers operate on an add-only basis. That means keys can only be uploaded and never removed. We can use these keyservers as a tool to investigate potential problems in the cryptography of PGP-implementations. Similar projects regarding TLS and HTTPS have uncovered a large number of issues in the past.

The talk will present a tool to parse the data of PGP keyservers and put them into a database. It will then have a look at potential cryptographic problems. The tools used will be published under a free license after the talk.

The TLS protocol is one of the foundations of Internet security. In recent years it's been under attack: Various vulnerabilities, both in the protocol itself and in popular implementations, showed how fragile that foundation is.

On the other hand new features allow to use TLS in a much more secure way these days than ever before. Features like Certificate Transparency and HTTP Public Key Pinning allow us to avoid many of the security pitfals of the Certificate Authority system.